Hong Kong's controversial bullet train may have performed above all expectations, but only a few passengers were impressed. About 46,463 travelers managed to take the trains, only half of the previous estimate of 80,000 passengers daily.

Passengers who took the train on the first day of the workweek were only 40 percent fewer than those which were expected. However, the city railway operations chief wasn't worried; instead, they focused on making the services better. SCMP noted only 38 percent of the previous 75,517 crowds that came on Sunday took the train on Monday.

MTR Corp chairman Frederick Ma Si-hang said that he wasn't worried about the numbers. Tuesday's turnout was even poorer than Monday's with only 21,357 passengers turning in to use Hong Kong's bullet train. The chairman was still positive despite the turnout; it needed to pick up, however, in the next days, if the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link wishes to break even. The bullet train cost around $10.8 billion USD and took about ten years or more to plan.

The confusion in services wasn't unfounded; it happened because of problems in the processes covering ticketing, lining up of crowds, as well as a few technical difficulties which happened during the train's opening on Sunday. People were presumably wary of experiencing such problems on the way to work, hence the sudden drop in the people lining up to take the train.

Tuesday was a different situation. It was a public holiday in Hong Kong, and there were large crowds out and about, visiting shops and dining in restaurants especially near the bullet train station. However, curiously, the crowds weren't lining up to take the bullet train.

The train was also considered controversial because it connected Hong Kong to the mainland area, or what was known as the "Greater Bay Area" of China. Critics of it called it a symbol of further assimilation by China; supporters, however, can only see an easier way to travel from the mainland to Hong Kong without taking a ferry or a local flight, which was considered both costly and time-consuming.

Dr. Hung Wing-tat of the Hong Kong Society for Transportation Studies considered it 'unfair' to judge the railway's performance based only on one or two days. He said that a broader picture would be available if it was reviewed for at least a month or sometime longer than that.